1x08 The Last Evening

[3.8/10] How many cliffhangers and “shocking” developments can you throw into one season finale before the whole thing just crumples under its own weight? I’m not sure what the limit is, but “The Last Evening” exceeds it in about the first twenty minutes of the episode.

There’s really too many to count, but let’s try to go over them all briefly, character-by-character.

● Lucy is pregnant with Andy’s baby and he didn’t take the news well.
● Catherine and Shelly are in a burning building at the saw mill.
● Pete is running in to save them.
● Josie is being blackmailed by Hank, who may or may not have the real books for the saw mill
● Hank also shot Leo Johnson
● Ben Horne is about to find out that the “new girl” at One-Eyed Jack’s is his daughter.
● Dr. Jacoby is in a coma, or at least incapacitated, after some mysterious dude in a baklava beats him up while he’s looking at Maddy (whom he believes to be Laura)
● Leland murders Jacques who was in police custody at the local hospital
● Nadine tries to commit suicide and Ed walks in to find her incapacitated and calls an ambulance
● James is in deep trouble after Bobby tips off the cops while pretending to be Leo and plants cocaine on James’s bike, which the cops discover
● And, oh yeah, Cooper gets shot three times in the stomach to close the episode.

It’s just too much. Maybe, there’s a part of me that can appreciate this sort of thing as a type of ambition, to have so many balls in the air that the audience has no idea where they’re going to land. But at some point, you’re not so much presenting twist after twist, or tease after tease, but just throwing out a bunch of soapy nonsense. I understand trying to have a dramatic finale, but none of these stories have time to breathe or land, they’re just thrown out there, one after another, in a ten car pile-up of plot points without any real development or advancement.

Thankfully, in the early going of the episode, we get a little actual policework as Cooper shows his chops in dealing with Jacques. Jacques actually makes for an interesting presence here. When the camera zooms in on his mouth as he tells Cooper what happened (or at least part of what happened) up in the cabin, there’s a down to Earth sleaziness about him that, again, sets him apart from the cartoon characters that typically inhabit Twin Peaks. For once, he’s a character who seems like a regular scumbag, a bad dude who’s not a mustache-twirling villain, just a standard creep without much of a moral compass.

And he gives the audience the best account for what happened to Laura so far, or at least, helps piece together the clues Cooper and company have been picking up for a while now. We get confirmation that it was Jacques, Leo, Laura, and the other girl up at the cabin, getting their rocks off with some BDSM stuff and making ads for Flesh World. Laura was tied up as part of those activities (seemingly, at least on Jacques’ account -- whatever that’s worth -- by her own request) when Waldo the myna bird pecked at her. Leo made her bite down on the poker chip for some reason, he and Jacques got into a fight with a bottle, and Jacques, somewhat conveniently, doesn’t know what happened between then and the train car.

It’s not that much, but it helps bring some things into focus and lets the team dig deeper into what happened that night. It also gives us a little more insight in the two sides of Laura Palmer and the dark stuff she was into.

But this is also an episode where the show returns to terrible monologues full of purple prose and bad acting that say nothing in particular. For some reason, Twin Peaks makes much of its finale into The Hank Show, and the actor who plays him (who bears a striking resemblance to a young Bryan Cranston) is not up to spouting the nonsense he has to deliver with any sort of conviction or talent.

In particular, his little speech to Josie about what his time is worth (oh yeah, one other minor cliffhanger-ish thing, he apparently had a hand in helping Josie knock off her husband), is the sort of overwritten B.S. that can make this show insufferable at times. There’s some mildly clever, if on-the-nose camera work where Hank is framed so that the antlers posted on the wall look like horns emerging from his head (“He’s evil! Do you get it?!”) but the whole thing is full of cheese. And if that weren’t enough, his other little speech to Norma if full of the same sort of cornball lines that don’t land at all.

But it can’t all be pinned on Hank. Catherine and Pete have a painful, painful exchange about how their marriage has fallen into the state it’s in, and it comes off like a proto-ripoff of a bad Hallmark Channel movie. To top it all off, Donna, James, and Maddy all listen to the tape Laura recorded for Dr. Jacoby, and Laura’s hokey attempts at lasciviousness just sound funny when they’re supposed to be a window into the dark parts of her soul. I don’t know if it’s Mark Frost returning to pen the episode (he returns to the director’s chair as well here), but after leveling out a bit, the quality of the dialogue in this one takes a steep plunge, particular in that handful of really awful scenes.

But even the bad lines could be forgiven, or at least compartmentalized, if “The Last Evening” didn’t feel like Twin Peaks throwing everything it had against the wall and seeing what sticks. More and more, it seems clear that the show is admired for the things it did that were innovative -- serialization, weirdness, multi-character plots -- but that it was taking the first, Bambi-like steps at these things, making it seem rudimentary at best to the modern viewer who’s used to much better execution of such things.

That just leaves the nuts and bolts of the show -- bad individual performances, dimestore meditations on duality, and corny music and lines, for everything to marinate in. The show’s first season is a messy hodgepodge of all this overblown crud, and the finale, which tries to cram too much into too little, is a microcosm of the problems that hobbled the show out of the gate.

She is still my wife!

We see people still love and fidelity to their spouse like pete. Went into fire to save the wife.

Other side, lots of intrigues. Trying to scam iceland people (probably it is scamming).

Lots of unexplained things. Lots of questions It was good finale.

James (i think he was james?) shot leo. He was trying to kill him, not trying to save bobby. But bobby tried to send james to prison. It was really interesting. It is like they united against mafia.

Donna's exboyfriend was not seen for a few episodes?

I thought that jacques were murderer but i now believe, leo is not also murderer. Real murderers shot cooper. Such a lovely, polite person.

I could not so much get it also that asian woman. She was with lots of people. She is real survivor.

I will come maybe months later to watch season 2 because i watch series episode by episode. So now i will go on another series.

Laura thought james was dumb but despite that, james revenged for her , shot leo.

Laura was a woman with unusual fantasies. noone can blame her. Probably she did not need money, she was doing for fun. She maybe wanted to taste being close to death to get pleasure , maybe died in this way. Or doctor became jealous and killed. Or, there is another guy, with J letter named and he was that secretperson, not leo.